One
hundred years ago on September 7th a soldier at
Camp Devens was sent to the base
hospital with an initial
diagnosis of meningitis.The next day 12
men from his company fell sick and the doctors quickly
realized that they were
dealing with an outbreak of influenza.At its peak, over 1,500 soldiers at Camp Devens
would report with influenza in a single day, overwhelming the
base hospital
with its 1,200 beds. In
her memoir Water
for Soldiers , Shirley Lawton Houde wrote
poignantly of soldier deaths from influenza;“A Camp telephone girl tells of ghastly days in the Devens
exchange, when, with their own force rapidly falling off,
the operators worked
unceasingly to transmit the dreadful messages. Obliged to
listen in to make
sure that the connection was kept, they would hear one
scream of despair after
another, hour after hour, until it seemed that they could
not take another
call.”

The
first wave of influenza hit Europe in April, 1918.It was a milder
strain of the disease and
soon abated, but it resurfaced in August and spread rapidly
through the
battlefields, aided by the unsanitary conditions of the
trenches.This
new virulent strain of influenza was
first introduced to the United States at Camp Devens
by returning soldiers from the Front.Although the camp was quarantined, the flu soon spread
to the area
towns.

In
looking at the Turner’s Public Spirit weekly
newspapers of that period,
the first mention of influenza in Shirley was in the edition
of September
21.It reported
that schools had been
closed the previous week and would remain so for a month, and
the Board of Health
imposed a prohibition on all public gatherings in town.The first reports of
illnesses of various
townspeople revealed the terrible characteristics of this
strain of flu.Defying
common logic, those most susceptible
to the dangers of this flu were people in their prime of life,
rather than
young children or the elderly who would have weaker immune
systems.Within
days of contracting the flu, its
victims would develop pneumonia that often would prove fatal.

On
September 29 the newspaper reported that there were about
sixty cases of
influenza at the Industrial School for Boys in Shirley, and on
October 5 the Board
of Health in Shirley reported 400 cases of influenza and 50
cases of pneumonia.Fortunately
there were no deaths at the state
school but there were many young men and women in Shirley who
died, tragically
leaving their children without a mother or father.

By
October 5, the newspaper reporter could write “Shirleyites rejoice to hear companies of men in khaki singing
lustily as they
swing down the road.It
is a sign of
renewed spirit as the epidemic at Camp Devens
is
controlled.” It took a while longer for the disease to
spend itself in
town.On October
26 it was reported that
the following Monday schools would reopen and the ban on
public gatherings
would be lifted.Churches
could once
again have Sunday services and the Grange and social lodges
could resume their
meetings.

While
talked about as an epidemic during its outbreak, it has now
been classified as
a pandemic given the immensity of its toll.It was the deadliest outbreak of disease in human
history with 50 to 100
million deaths worldwide.In the United
States the number of deaths was 670,000, far greater than the
number of
American casualties in World War I.